shrewd reply, "I have a long time courted | is a pleasant account of Lucy Apsley, the that young gentlewoman there, my lady's noble wife of Colonel Hutchinson. Sketches, woman, and cannot prevail. I was, there- also, are given of Mrs. Baxter, Mrs. Bunfore, humbly praying her ladyship to inter-yan, and several other women of that gencede for me." The Protector was willing to eration. The book ends, as it should, with take that lie for truth. Turning to the maid mention of a granddaughter of Oliver Cromhe said, "What is the meaning of this, well, Mrs. Bridget Bendish. Travelling huzzy? Why refuse the honor Mr. White once in a coach with two strangers, she was would do you? He is my friend, and I angered by their disparaging conversation expect you should treat him as such." The on the great Protector, and still more by the girl, pleased and astonished, but with her extreme abuse which one of them poured on wits about her, made the best of her strange her when she essayed to defend him. The chance. "If Mr. White intends me that controversy became hotter and hotter until honor," she said, with a courtesy and a blush, at last, on their arriving at a halting-place, "I shall not be against him." "Sayest the lady demanded a private interview with thou so, my lass? "cried Cromwell; "call her opponent. Then she told him that in Goodwin. This business shall be done pres- the grossest manner he had belied the most ently, before I go out of the room." He pious man that ever lived; that Cromwell's awarded a dowry of five hundred pounds, blood, flowing in her veins, would not allow and the marriage was at once effected. The her to pass over the indignities cast on his end of that comedy, we are told, was fifty memory in her presence; that though she years of unhappiness between husband and could not handle a sword, she could use a wife. Fanny Cromwell, however, was saved pistol as well as any one,-and that she defrom the parson's clutch, and lived to be manded instant satisfaction to the injured wife first of Robert Rich and afterwards of honor of her family. Of course an apology Sir John Russell, and to be spoken of by was made, and the stout-hearted representaBishop Burnet as "a very worthy person." tive of Cromwell and Ireton lived to be In the second volume of this book there eighty years old.

THE USE OF MOULDS AND FERMENTS. At the meeting of the Institute of France, on the 10th inst., M. Pasteur, who is at the present moment the most distinguished member in the department of the physiological sciences, brought forward the result of his researches as to the part which moulds and fungi play in the economy of nature. This is extremely interesting. He finds that when diluted spirit is made to trickle over shavings of wood in an open barrel, and in so doing is converted into vinegar (which is the usual process of vinegar-making), the change is in fact due, not to the exposure of the spirit to the oxygen of the air merely, and its conversion into acid by the absorption of that oxygen, as is commonly supposed, but to the vital action of a kind of mould or fungus which soon covers the shavings and is in fact the wellknown vinegar-plant. He finds also that when this or any other analogous organism is allowed to act without limitation, whether upon spirit or vinegar or any other liquid of an analogous nature, it goes on still burning them more and

more until they are all reduced to the ordinary products of combustion, those which are given out from common fires; viz., carbonic acid and moulds and microscopic vegetations in nature the vapor of water. The great abundance of is thus happily explained. They are provided by the Creator for burning up decaying organic matter when it is dead, which, if left to spontaneous and merely chemical corruption, would be injurious to the living. Pasteur also shows that these microscopic cellular plants perform on the surface of our planet generally what the blood-globules do in our living systems. They fix and carry oxygen to burn up the effete matter, which, in consequence of the activities and uses of life, is consequently making its appearance in every tissue. In other words, a process the same in nature as respiration in us is constantly going on over the whole surface of the world, at once preventing putrefaction, and providing food for the more highly organized members of the vegetable kingdom, for of such food carbonic acid and common vapor are two of the principal elements.-Press.

From The Saturday Review.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.*

samples of her verse it is probable that she needed practice only to become a satirist Ir Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ever cov- second to Swift and Pope alone. Luckily eted notoriety, present or posthumous, she for the permanence of her reputation, she did not add, through any want of it, another rarely entered the lists of poetry, since to to the many instances of the vanity of hu- be second in a kind of composition so man wishes. It was accorded to her through ephemeral as satire is to be soon forgotten; life in full measure, nor was it withdrawn at whereas so long as familiar letters attract her death. She is still a remarkable person, readers or aid the historians of public events with a dubious character. Nearly every cir- or private manners, the correspondence of cumstance in her career savored more or less Lady Mary will survive. Some of the value of eccentricity. Her father-Marquis of of that correspondence, however, depends Dorchester in 1706, and subsequently Duke upon her personal character, and the genuof Kingston-was an unlucky combination ineness of the letters; and we shall confine of Michio and Demea in the same person. ourselves to these two material questionsHe was negligent while her character was-how far is the writer to be trusted, and forming-he was severe after it had become how far are the letters to be accepted as fixed. Her husband was originally capti- private and unreserved communications, vated by her beauty, her brilliant conversa- meant or not meant for the public eye? tion, and her social accomplishments; but The portrait of Lady Mary, as drawn by no sooner had he secured her esteem, and herself and her friends, and the portrait of possibly her affections, than he transplanted her as sketched by Pope and Walpole, differ her into a rural retreat where her gifts were as widely from each other as the Socrates of useless, and where a complete housewife Plato and the Socrates of the comic poet. would have answered all purposes. Her They cannot be reconciled. The imputed son, it is to be hoped, was mad-certainly virtues can never have degenerated into the he was about as great a plague as ever af- alleged vices. The Sappho of Pope, the flicted and perplexed parents and guardians. harridan of Walpole, can have no fellowShe herself was in early years on intimate ship with the staid, if not the fond wife of terms with the leaders in politics and litera- Wortley Montagu, with the careful and tenture, and among these she contrived to em- der mother of Lady Bute, with the early broil herself with Swift, Pope, and the Wal- friend of Addison, Arbuthnot, and "wellpoles-the hornets of the nest of wits and natured Garth," or with tastes and a disposistatesmen. Her pen was sharp, and her tion which would seem to have courted retongue even sharper than her pen; and by tirement and literature, and avoided what handing about unprinted satires and epi- was within her reach, court-favor and pubgrams, and by unreserved freedom in con- lic display. Lady Mary's ill-name (and it versation with good-natured friends, she is a very bad one) springs from two printurned the envy excited by her talents and cipal sources-the verse of Pope and the learning into that fear which is akin to prose of Walpole. For the hatred of the hatred. Perhaps Lady Mary was the best-latter, as we shall see presently, there was abused woman of her own or any age.

an obvious cause; but it is still a mystery To commend her well-known Letters why the extravagant admiration of the forwould be to gild gold or to paint the lily. mer should have turned suddenly into as They rank high among British classics; they extravagant aversion.

have survived many revolutions in wit and We must not, indeed, take Pope's comtaste, and more than one crisis in the prog-pliments for more than they are worth. It ress of morals and manners; and they are was the fashion of his day for men to address still attractive by their frankness, good sense, and occasional brilliance. From the *The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wort ley Montagu. Edited by her Great-Grandson, Lord Wharnchile. Third Edition, with Additions and Corrections derived from the Original Manuscripts, Hlustrative Notes, and a New Memoir by W. Moy

Thomas. 2 vols. London: Bohn. 1861.

their female correspondents in phrases befitting a courtship between Strephon and Phillis, and their own sex in language becoming Damon and Pythias. Neither Phillis nor Pythias, however, regarded such hyperboles as "delations working from the heart," so much as courtesies that well-bred

people expected and repaid. Still there them, was a composition which he appears must have been some fire, or there could to have regarded with a peculiar pride, for have been no smoke; and we must believe he addressed copies of it only slightly varied that for awhile Pope felt some admiration to several of his friends. He was, therefore, for one whom he addressed in such glowing his somewhat exaggerated sentiment, or the little likely to relish the ridicule cast upon metaphors as in our prosaic age would be amusement which the friends of Lady Mary accounted insulting or insane. Pope's cor- derived from the spectacle of his supposed respondence with Lady Mary began shortly humiliation. Pope revelled in the vulgar before her departure for Constantinople, was attacks made upon him by small critics and at "fever heat" during her sojourn in the poor poets, and dexterously turned them to East, cooled down after her return to Eng be beaten by a woman with his own weapons; the advantage of his own renown. But to land, and was approaching zero in 1721 and to be represented as laughed out of counte1722. There were some reasons for abate-nance and out of all his fine sentimentalisms ment of friendship, at least of compliment, and artificial moralizings, in the presence of but no apparent motive for satirical outrage an audience who enjoyed his discomfiture, at that time, or for some years afterwards. was an offence which Pope's sensitive and When their acquaintance began, Pope was spiteful nature could not easily forgive." indifferent about politics, and was suspected We must accept this solution of their feud, of Whig tendencies only, perhaps, because for we have none better to offer; but it does he associated and wrote in conjunction with not content us. It is too slight a cause for Steele and Addison. By the year 1720, such injuries as Lady Mary suffered and rehowever, he had allied himself with extreme taliated, although to fence with Pope was Tories Swift, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Atter- fully as dangerous as to wake a sleeping bury, and Bathurst; while Lady Mary and wolf or to probe a wasp's nest. We susher husband, Whigs by birth and connec- pect that the parody and the banter were tion, had become Whigs of influence. Ac- only the later links in a chain of similar if cordingly, though Pope and the Wortley not equal provocations on her ladyship's Montagus all lived at Twickenham, they part. She was not likely to be pleased with had no intercourse there, and Lady Mary his libel on Addison, her old and revered never saw that famous grotto which some friend. She was evidently hurt by his coolyears later she described as the "Palace of Dulness"

placed beneath a muddy road And such the influence of the dull abode The carrier's horse above can scarcely drag his load."

Mr. Moy Thomas, in his "new Memoir," after dismissing various surmises as insufficient to account for the rupture and the virulence on either side, suspects that Lady Mary owed the hatred of the satirist to "her clever parody, accompanied by some prosaic banter, upon his well-known epitaph on the Lovers struck by Lightning." This, even as an impromptu, would have annoyed the touchy bard, and the knowledge that it circulated in manuscript among her ladyship's friends was quite enough to kindle his ready

ness at Twickenham, "sending a common friend to ask Mr. Pope why he left off visiting me." She had in her writing-desk a copy of a satire on Pope written by the Duke of Wharton. She never scrupled between having her joke and losing her friend. In short, her ladyship had not the admirable gift of silence; and Pope was surrounded by fetchers and carriers of gossip, which lost nothing in its passage. From whatever cause, down came a pitiless storm on Lady Mary's head. "You shall see," she remarked to Spencer, concerning Pope's letters, "what a goddess he makes me in some of them, though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of." We must leave Mr. Moy Thomas to trace the spring-tide of satire, from the Capon's Tale, written by Pope or Swift, or both, and published in their Mis"The piquancy of the poem (her most cellany, to "the savage attack in his Imitarecent biographer observes) could not have! failed to attract attention, or the whole mat- tion of Horace," where he fixes on herter to come quickly to the ears of Pope. his crowning insult-the name of Sappho His letter containing the story of the Lovers and all its hideous associations. It may struck by Lightning, with his epitaph upon seem a waste of time to dive any further for

ire:

the root of this mystery. When fire and | avenues and terraces of West Dean in Wilttow meet together, there can be only one shire, and the company or correspondence result. It is, however, material for Lady of a few friends, all of them older than herMary's character to lift even a corner of the self. veil. For, if only half of what is alleged against her be fact, then her ladyship must take her place with posterity among the scandals of her sex, among Catherine de Medici's "Ladies of Honor," or De Grammont's heroines, or the Agrippinas and Messalinas of Roman story.

on Lady Mary lay the burden of admonishing friendly with him, had imbibed her husand checking the devious and disgraceful band's spirit, is manifest in allusions to courses of their son Edward. Fortunately for her, there was a worthier object for her care and affection. Not Marie de Sévigné's love for her daughter is more emphatically inscribed in the Letters than Lady Mary's love for the Countess of Bute.

Whether England and its ways were distasteful to her, or whether she felt the smart of slander, does not clearly appear; but Lady Mary continued to reside abroad for twenty years, and only returned to her own country to die. Abroad she had acquired habits of independence which gave offence at home, and perhaps made more credible some of Pope's epigrams. We can discover no grounds for the profligacy imputed to her; but it might be difficult to defend her from the charge of slovenliness. There is probably fact as well as point in the gibe," Linen worthy Lady Mary." We suggest, therefore, that as between her ladyship and her principal foe, the case stood pretty nearly thus. She, in the first place, belonged to the Addison and Steele party among the wits, and with them Pope had quarrelled. She and her husband remained stanch Whigs, while he had gone over to the Tories. She had ridiculed the Democritus of Twickenham, and to ridicule others was, in his estimation, the sole and single function of the Drapier and himself. She was generally provided with more than one oddity-as, for example, with such a champion of the rights of women as Mrs. Mary Astell-and so presented to the satirical sagittary an inviting mark. Her wit and her verses were too near in merit to those of Pope for him to endure with equanimity a sister near the throne; and finally, she was in league with Lord Hervey. Him the Memoirs of the Court of George II. prove to have been one whom Pope might perhaps justly fear, but whom he could only affect to despise.

For Walpole's hostility to Lady Mary, we need not beat the bushes. The causes of hatred are patent, and are thus stated by Mr. Moy Thomas:

Walpole in her poems, no less than in her fragmentary sketch of the Court of George I. In the latter period of Sir Robert Walpole's career, this antagonism was still more conspicuous. The few of Mr. Wortley's speeches delivered at this period which have been preserved, are all attacks upon Sir Robert; but it was in the hour of Walpole's disgrace, when an insult would be more keenly felt than ever, and when young Horace, just entered upon the scene, found his father's popularity and influence at an end, that Mr. Wortley assailed the falling minister in an invective which could never have been forgiven. The occasion was Mr. Sandy's motion for the removal of Walpole, and Mr. Wortley concluded his speech by moving that while this question is debated, Sir Robert Walpole be ordered to withdraw;' one of the objects of this, which he urged, being to suppress that awe which may be raised in part of this assembly by a powerful offender, whose looks may upbraid some with the benefits which they have formerly received from him, and whose eyes may dart menaces upon those who are dependent on his favor.""

Henceforward shall the name of Montagu be anathema maranatha in Arlington Street and at Twickenham.

We have left ourselves no space for exbrated letters are letters in the usual sense amining the question whether these celeof the word, or, in many circumstances, transcripts from voluminous and carefully kept journals, adapted to the tastes and circumstances of Lady Mary's several correspondents. In this respect, as in so much else pertaining to her, there is a mystery; but the doubt is immaterial, though such a practice may detract somewhat from the freshness of epistolary communication. The letters, as we possess them, are so good that it is akin to the sins of unreasonable murmuring to wish them better.

His

Mr. Moy Thomas deserves great credit for his editorial pains. He has performed what his predecessors strangely neglectedthe duty of collating the printed copies of the corespondence with the original letters wherever the latter could be obtained. "In his judgments upon those who had "New Memoir" is a temperate defence of walked the political stage somewhat earlier one who was grossly calumniated; and than the commencement of his own career, though he does not attempt to vindicate Horace Walpole had frequently but one the indiscretions of Lady Mary, he proves standard of vice and virtue. The opponents at least that to have nettled Pope and to of his father, Sir Robert, rarely found favor have been among Sir Robert Walpole's in his writings. . . . But Mr. Wortley had opponents, even by marriage, were, of her rendered himself peculiarly odious to Wal- many misfortunes, perhaps the most injuripole; and that Lady Mary, though once ous to herself.